Abstract
In designing assembly lines, it is required that the lines should not only meet the demand of the product, but also minimize the assembly cost associated with the line. For such a purpose, numerous research efforts have been made on either the assembly sequence generation or the assembly line balancing. However, the works dealing with both the research problems have been seldom reported in literature. When assembly sequences are generated without consideration of line balancing, additional cost may be incurred, because the sequences may not guarantee the minimum number of workstations. Therefore, it is essential to consider line balancing in the generation of cost-effective assembly sequences. To incorporate the two research problems into one, this paper treats a single-model and deterministic (SMD) assembly line balancing (ALB) problem, and proposes a new method for generating line-balanced robotic assembly sequences by using a simulated annealing. In this method, an energy function is derived in consideration of the satisfaction of assembly constraints, and the minimization of both the assembly cost and the idle time. Then, the energy function is iteratively minimized and occasionally perturbed by the simulated annealing. When no further change in energy occurs, an assembly sequence with consideration of line balancing is finally found. To show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, a case study for an electrical relay is presented.
